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I did a long case study on this in my pre-law stuff (which I never took to a
complete law school, I hasten to add...I found out I didn't approve of
wrangling for money).
The legal term for this practice is "fair use" and it's a malarial swamp of
"yes's" and "no's". According to the copyright act, you can extract little
snippets from other works to illustrate points, generally limited to a
sentence or two, or at most a few paragraphs. This is mostly the province of
academics who don't have the money to buy lots of reprint rights, but
commercial enterprises can do it too if there's a darned good reason for it.
Courts haven't always been kind to commercial usages, though. In one famous
case, a comedian staged a satirical version of the play/movie "Gaslight",
called "Autolight", which featured a large number of fully recognizable
lines and other attributes, although very few items were actually lifted
whole from the original. Still, the court ruled that the owners of
"Gaslight" had been infringed and awarded damages.
The general tests are whether or not the public good is being served by the
infringement, whether you're taking a significant amount, and whether the
"taking" is going to hurt the copyright owner. (Lift directly and you're
infringing; with fair use you're protected from consequences of the
infringement, but it's still an infringement.)
If you're just quoting some IT magazine or another about some kind of
hardware, then you're probably treading on cracking ice. If you're quoting a
biotech magazine article about killer bacteria hiding in biotech machinery,
you're probably a lot safer.
Personally, I wouldn't push the issue. You can paraphrase and say "According
to the IT Gazette's April 1998 issue, there's no data to support the
contention that routers cause hairy palms and blindness." That's legal,
safe, and compelling.
A good source for much of this law is The Writer's Lawyer by Goldfarb and
Ross.
Tim Altom
Adobe Certified Expert, Acrobat
Simply Written, Inc.
The FrameMaker support people
Ask about Clustar Method training and consulting
317.899.5882 http://www.simplywritten.com
>We want to quote an article in the text of one of our documents. I have =
>tried contacted the magazine to ask for reprint permission, and they =
>insist on us purchasing printed reprints. (Actually, I think the =
>salesperson is just a pain.) I have since written them explaining that =
>we don't want to include printed reprints, that we want to pull quotes =
>from the article, and of course reference the article. I have contacted =
>them again and again, and they won't return my call.
>
>My question is: Is it legal to pull quotes from an article without =
>permission? I know we did it all the time in college, but a public =
>relations friend of mine said she thinks that is illegal, but generally =
>accepted in academia.
>
>Anyone know the real answer? Know where I can find the real answer?
>
